


Joy Is My Name

by schweinsty



Category: The Mentalist
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Post-Series, childbirth complications
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-11
Updated: 2016-09-11
Packaged: 2018-08-14 09:09:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8007400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/schweinsty/pseuds/schweinsty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Teresa, naturally, makes a detailed plan for the day of the birth and forces Patrick to sign it.</p><p>Things don't exactly work out that way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Joy Is My Name

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ruuger](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ruuger/gifts).



> Written for a prompt on comment-fic over on livejournal.
> 
> Title from 'Infant Joy' by William Blake.

Teresa, naturally, makes a very detailed birth plan (and blackmails Patrick into signing it). Patrick will take the week around the birth date off, and they'll stick close to home, just in case. Once labor starts, they'll head to the hospital in the minivan (go-bag ready in the trunk), where Teresa will have a natural birth in a low-stress environment with Patrick sitting next to her and holding her hand.

Patrick, of course, knows the chances of it going to plan are negligible. He'll panic, of course, because he knows maternal mortality rates (has maybe been obsessing over all the things that could go wrong), and Teresa's going to be upset enough at how he drives (because he'll want to go fast, because he'll be terrified of what might happen if she doesn't get to the hospital quickly enough, but then he'll want to take it at a crawl because he'll be even more terrified of crashing) that the nurses are going to get nurse-ish and try to placate the both of them, and—well. This baby is not going to come into the world in anything even remotely resembling a low-stress environment.

Teresa makes him sign the damn plan anyway, and scoffs at him when he grumbles. It becomes an ongoing joke between them, as the pregnancy wears on; she'll ask for something—back rub, foot massage, pint of birthday cake ice-cream—and he'll make a crack about adding it to the plan.

When she's thirty-three weeks in, she gets a craving for key lime pie that won't go away, and she sends him out on a Saturday afternoon to the HEB two blocks down to pick one up. He doesn't linger, but he picks up a bouquet of flowers as well and strikes up conversation with the man in line behind him, a high school physics teacher by the name of Archibald.

When he gets back home, Teresa's sitting on the floor in a puddle of blood, phone on her shoulder, and the ambulance is four minutes out.

He thinks later, that he says some reassuring things. It's a little fuzzy when he thinks about it. He recalls with perfect clarity the ambulance ride, holding Teresa's hand while the EMT stripped off the leggings and panties she wore under her jersey and yelled at the driver up front to take it faster.

He holds her hand and strokes her head and tells her it's going to be all right. As bullshitting goes, he's in his finest form.

They don't let him stay with her once they reach the hospital. They unload and wheel in, pull him away and pull him back and whisk her to an operating prep room, half a dozen people in scrubs swarming around her stretcher.

Patrick waits in the hall, staring after her, until a nurse's aid in pastel pink scrubs directs him to a chair in the waiting room. She hands him a clipboard to fill out, tells him they'll update him as soon as there's news, and asks him if there's anyone he needs to call.

“Oh,” he says. His head's buzzing. “Cho. I should call Cho.”

He does.

Cho shows up in fifteen minutes. He tells Patrick to sit down and stop pacing and keeps his mouth shut when Patrick stands up and starts pacing again a minute and a half later.

Good old Cho.

Patrick sits and stands and paces and sits and twitches.

“She'll be fine,” Cho says. “They'll be fine.”

“Right.” Patrick worries a button on his waistcoat until the thread starts to fray. “Because bad things never happen to good people.”

Cho mostly keeps quiet after that. He does go for coffees, gets the good stuff from the Starbucks off the cafeteria, which Patrick takes as a peace offering. It only makes Patrick more twitchy, but it's thoughtful.

Updates come sporadically. They're trying to stabilize her, to delay the delivery for another week or two; they've stopped trying to stabilize her and are moving to a C-section; the C-section's started, but there's no way to say one way or the other.

Cho steps out once or twice with his cell phone. Patrick doesn't need to hear him to know Cho's calling all the friends Patrick and Teresa've made, Cho-like, with dual purposes: first, to update everyone on what's going on, second to make sure Jane has support. To make sure Jane has friends around to ground him and keep him from doing something drastic in case Teresa and the baby die.

As if they could stop him.

Finally, a little before midnight, a doctor finally comes out. Patrick knows—Patrick should know, what his expression means, that the way he's walking and the way he's holding his hands means something, that the man's telegraphing something very, very clearly.

Patrick has no idea what it is.

“How is she?” he asks. He holds his hands together to keep them from shaking. “How are they? Are they—how is it?”

“There were a few complications,” the doctor starts out with, and he goes into this explanation, words on words on words which Patrick files away to parse later when he can, but finally—finally—he winds to a close, and it's with, “And they should both pull through.”

“Thank you,” Patrick says. 

It's possible he hugs the man.

It's going to be a little while before the baby's set up in the NICU, and it's hard, so hard, not to run back there and try to find her, but they take him to sit with Teresa until then. 

She's out, of course, will be unconscious probably until mid-morning, and it's so strange to see her quiet and still that the relief in Patrick's throat sinks back down a little. Her hand's warm, though, when he holds it, and her chest moves up and down steadily on its own.

They come for him twenty minutes later and show him to the NICU.

“She's in an incubator,” the nurse tells him, “And she'll need it for the oxygen for a couple of days. They've told you the risks?”

Patrick nods. A risk of vision loss from the oxygen, maybe even blindness. But it's necessary.

He dons the cap and gloves and apron they give him and follows them in, and then. Then.

There she is.

Tiny. Smaller than Charlotte ever was. Incredibly, ridiculously small. Jaundiced and crying with a tube taped to her nose and a needle in her thigh.

Alive.

She squirms, the few brief moments they let him hold her. Scrunches her eyes up and wails. His arms feel empty when he sets her back down.

“She's like Benjamin Button,” Cho says later when they let him in. “Only uglier. Congratulations. What's her name?”

“Emily. Emily Joan.” Emily because it's a classic name they could both agree on, Joan because Teresa has that creepy Catholic thing for people who got burned at stakes. “Emily Joan Jane.”

“Hmm.” Cho claps him on the back. “She'll be fine.”

“Yeah,” Patrick says. He reaches out and touches the top of the incubator, and his daughter blinks up at the shadow of his hand. “She'll be okay.”

She's already perfect as it is, he thinks but doesn't say.


End file.
